


covered in the colours, pulled apart at the seams

by thaliasgrace



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 20:12:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13795428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thaliasgrace/pseuds/thaliasgrace
Summary: (Later, Wells tells her that she is a shade of soft lavender, and they look the meanings up together, heads bent towards one another. Gold for compassion and courage, lavender for independence, creativity, pride.)Then the colours stop, for a while. Blues and oranges are all that Clarke has, and she makes a point to paint in shades she doesn’t know.She assumes that later she will come back and see the colours, associate them with the people she loves.(She is wrong. She realises, later, that she should never have assumed anything. Colour is hard to get and harder to keep, especially when you are Clarke Griffin. Wanheda.)Or:Every person you love is a new colour you see, but down on the ground colours are complicated and it’s difficult to make them stay.





	covered in the colours, pulled apart at the seams

**Author's Note:**

> If you don’t understand- when you love someone, you get a colour that is basically ‘them’. When you stop loving them / if they die, the colour is gone. 
> 
> Title from Halsey, Colours.

The first colour Clarke Griffin sees is blue. She sees it when she’s two years old, and although she doesn’t remember it (her father tells her this story when she is older, time after time after time, his eyes blue, his smile in shades of grey) she is said to have reached up to try and touch her father’s eyes, said they were pretty, and asked why they were so bright.

Her father cries. Her mother looks on, and Clarke looks at her, next, and smiles. Simply smiles.

The colour of Abby Griffin takes longer to materialise, perhaps because it’s harder for Clarke to love a mother permanently busy at the hospital, permanently frazzled and tired and stressed, or maybe just because Abby is such a complicated person, layer after layer, that Clarke’s head or her heart or the universe (opinion varies over which one it is that decides the colours) can’t choose which colour Abigail Griffin should be.

Later, Clarke sees darker blues. Navy. The shadow of indigo, sometimes, if she squints.

The first colour she remembers happening was gold. She doesn’t realise what is happening, at first, sitting in a classroom with Wells. She reaches down for a pencil, leans too far, and before she knows what is happening, she is on the floor, staring at her pencil, black and white, different shades of grey everywhere apart from touches of blue, and then Wells’ hand is on her shoulder, and the world shifts.

It isn’t slow, like Abby says her husband’s blue had been for her. It was an explosion as the pencil turned a shining colour Clarke didn’t know the name for, then, and she turns to Wells and starts to cry.

(Later, Wells tells her that she is a shade of soft lavender, and they look the meanings up together, heads bent towards one another. Gold for compassion and courage, lavender for independence, creativity, pride.)

Then the colours stop, for a while. Blues and oranges are all that Clarke has, and she makes a point to paint in shades she doesn’t know.

She assumes that later she will come back and see the colours, associate them with the people she loves.

(She is wrong. She realises, later, that she should never have assumed anything. Colour is hard to get and harder to keep, especially when you are Clarke Griffin. Wanheda.)

She loses blue and gold when she is seventeen. She loses blue as her father dies, and she loses gold as she realises what Wells has done.

(She had thought that colours stayed even when ones you loved died. After all, Clarke still loves Jake Griffin, even now he is gone, but it doesn’t matter. The only colours she has now are the dark blue of her bed in solitude, and shades of grey in everything else. The world is nearly colourless, and Clarke thinks that it’s strange. Everyone says as you grow up you get more colours, but Clarke is losing them so fast.)

The ground is worse than the Ark is without colour. Wells is back, and Clarke can’t help but see touches of gold wherever she goes. Sometimes she turns, catches a glimpse of her own hair, yellow and bright, and she has to force herself to stop, close her eyes, focus.

She doesn’t- won’t- cannot- love him. Her father is dead and it is his fault.

Then there are touches more. Dark purple (passion, pride) for Finn. Clarke thinks that this means they are matched, perfect, her lavender and his darker shades, two halves of a whole.

(She is wrong. Clarke wants the purple to vanish as Raven Reyes reaches the earth, but it doesn’t.)

Monty Green is yellow for spirit, optimism, clarity. Jasper, always his reflection, his mirror, his best friend, is orange (enthusiasm, fascination, enjoyment). Later, though, the orange is dark, ugly. Change and regret and madness. And Monty’s yellow turns sickly, poisonous. Clarke knows they don’t know how to trust her anymore.

Octavia Blake takes a while, but it doesn’t matter. Pink sneaks into her life slowly, and Clarke knows that Octavia gets lavender in return, knows that Octavia yells at her, knows that Octavia might hate her, sometimes, but her lavender always returns. In their best moments, Octavia comments on the pretty flowers that grow outside their camp. To Clarke, they are grey, but she knows that they are her colour. Jasper told her so.

Pink for harmony, for heat and passion, for laughter. (Octavia’s pink is dark. Sometimes it borders on red, red for aggression, for anger, for years of living under a floor.)

Wells’s gold comes back for a brief few minutes as Clarke realises that it wasn’t him who betrayed her father after all. It’s only a few minutes, though (moments, maybe) before it’s taken away again, and Clarke is relieved that nobody she loves is truly red, so the blood she sees everywhere is grey and muted. Blue leaves with Wells’s gold.

Her father is dead and her mother helped kill him. Clarke is glad that she sees the navy blue of her shirt vanish in one smooth motion. No fits or starts for Abby. Her mother is a clean break.

Raven Reyes comes into Clarke’s life as green for jealousy, but as time goes on, the green turns to hope and endurance and stability. Raven’s leg is shot, and the green turns bitter, but Clarke tries to keep with Raven, tries to help. (Maybe it’s because Clarke still feels guilty. Maybe it’s because Raven is a genius, and she is brilliant, and Clarke has green for a reason.)

She sees Raven sorting medicine by colour, when she’s bored, and hides her smile as Raven touches her finger on a bottle Monty says is lavender (Clarke’s shade, individuality, independence, creativity) and calls the colour pretty.

Sometimes Clarke sees snatches of turquoise, too, in plants and medicine and people’s clothes. She sees it as Bellamy Blake offers to put himself in danger, _again_ , because he has no concept of safety, can’t see anything beyond Octavia, is still paying for the years under the floor (he did everything he could, but he can’t see it- sometimes Clarke thinks only she can), and she sees it as she remembers she is not alone, remembers that she is not the only one. She struggles her way out of the crushing sense of responsibility and tries to remind Bellamy, too, that he isn’t alone, that this is them, together, not two people, alone. Not anymore.

“Atlas,” he tells her. “He held up the sky. By himself.”

The meaning is clear. _Atlas did it. He did it, and maybe it nearly killed him, but he managed it, and so can I._

“Atlas didn’t have me,” Clarke says, and turquoise flares behind her eyes for a moment as Bellamy turns away so she can’t catch the pure relief on his face. The hope that she means it.

(Turquoise is loyalty and emotional balance, good luck and spiritual grounding. Clarke tells herself it isn’t Bellamy that she sees turquoise for, but the words ring hollow in her head.)

Purple is gone for good a few weeks or months late, gone with Finn. Navy blue still hasn’t returned, although her mother has, and Octavia’s pink is almost always red now.

Clarke has colours, yes, but it isn’t at all like she thought it would be. She’s afraid of losing them almost always, in more ways than one, and the ones that remain (after all, gold is gone, blue is gone, and now purple, too, is taken from her, taken by her own hands) are stained by jealousy and hate and anger and bitterness.

Raven avoids her. Monty and Jasper are distant, and Octavia is just angry.

Lexa is brown. Maybe it isn’t a colour intended to be pretty, but suddenly the woods Clarke walks through are in two colours, not just one, and although the green is still slightly tainted by Raven’s uneasy silences, the brown of elegance and stability and leadership is untainted, still.

(Until it isn’t. But then turquoise is fully in colour, and Clarke tries to forget how her brown is only in fits and starts.)

She leaves after Mount Weather. She still loves them all, has their colours, but she doesn’t know if they have hers.

She doesn’t think Bellamy does. She doesn’t think Jasper does, either.

He tells her Maya was yellow and gold, spits the words at her, and Clarke leaves because she has lost those colours, too, and she doesn’t know where to go. Bellamy hates her, and she had forgotten brown was ambition, too, and Monty stares at her the way he would stare at a snake. She is dangerous- poisonous.

Lexa’s browns reappear, and then they vanish again as Lexa dies. Everything else is muted for a while after that, all her existing colours, even Bellamy’s.

When Raven, under ALIE’s influence, tells Clarke that she can see everything in colour now, that nothing hurts anymore, Clarke almost says yes.

But she can’t. She thinks of Bellamy, turquoise, loyalty. _My sister, my responsibility._

_My people, my responsibility._

Everything is a blur after that. Death is something Clarke sees everyday.

Octavia’s red is permanent. There is no pink, ever, except for when she is with Bellamy. He says he still sees it, sometimes, but Bellamy always loves harder than anyone else, and he still sees Octavia under the floor in dreams (nightmares that Clarke has to wake him up from, nightmares where Octavia is dead and so is everyone else, and Clarke is the only one alive, but she has abandoned him- the _again_ is on his lips when he tells her this, and sometimes Clarke wonders if they can ever be the same as they were before).

Jasper is dead. Clarke’s orange had been faint before that, but she still clutches at her heart when the orange label of some medicine winks out, runs to check something yellow, desperate, because where Jasper goes Monty will follow.

Apart from this.

Except maybe he will. They are all going to die- and as Clarke watches, they race to the island, to Raven.

She is Atlas as she struggles to breathe in a broken radiation suit, pulling herself up and up and up to save her friends, knowing she won’t have time to make it back to them.

_My people, my responsibility._

Bellamy taught her what responsibility was. Now she can use it to save him, even if it costs her herself.

But she doesn’t die. She lives, barely, and every day she stares at the green of the leaves, turquoise sea, yellow flowers. Raven, Bellamy, Monty.

Octavia’s red is gone, but Clarke thinks that’s her and not Octavia. The red fades gradually, not all going out in a blink like Jasper’s orange or Wells’s gold.

Clarke talks to them, sometimes. She tells them she misses their colours. She tells them everything she wishes she could have said, before.

She tells Jasper she’s sorry. She tells Wells she’s sorry, too, and she should have known, because Wells would never have betrayed her, ever. She tells her father she’s trying, but five years is a long time by yourself, even if you know your friends are alive. (Navy blue is returning, sort of. Clarke has a lot of time to think when she’s alone, and nearly dying tells you a lot about what matters and what doesn’t. Her mother is her mother, still.)

She is Atlas again, but Bellamy is nowhere near.

She finds the radio almost by accident. She speaks into it almost like it’s a diary, and she doesn’t know if Bellamy gets her messages, but her turquoise is stronger than ever. He is alive, and she loves him.

She finds Madi almost by accident, too. It takes a while, but they talk, and when pink pops into view, Clarke half thinks it’s Octavia, back again.

But of course it isn’t. This pink is softer, innocence and joy and creativity and passion and childhood. Too young for Octavia. Too hopeful. Not angry enough, either.

The five year mark passes, and Clarke tells Madi it doesn’t matter, because she knows they’re alive. She tells the radio differently, though.

_Bellamy, it’s five years. That’s a long time to figure out how to get back. God, Bellamy, I miss you, and I think I’m going insane… I’m Atlas, now, alone with nothing but the sky. The sky and a kid Nightblood I found wandering about- Bellamy, I miss you._

Six years after the death wave, and they’re back. Clarke isn’t the first to find them, Madi is, but she knows who they are, guesses them all right, she tells Clarke proudly, later.

Clarke sees them all at once, and she half doesn’t know who to go to as the turquoise and green and yellow seem to flare even brighter. There’s even a cautious silver there that Clarke thinks belongs to Harper, and then she’s choking out half a sob and she’s in Bellamy’s arms (of course it’s Bellamy she goes to first- it’s Bellamy, after all) and everything is turquoise as he buries his head in her hair, as he whispers _I knew you wouldn’t let a little thing like a death wave kill you, princess,_ and she can’t speak at all, but she feels like she might burst.

(It’s her family, all here, and maybe all her colours aren’t with her anymore, but Clarke finds that with her arms wrapped around Bellamy, she’s too happy to feel anything but relief.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I love this universe a lot. If you liked it too, please leave a kudos and also let me know if I should do someone else’s version of this, or put this in a modern setting because I will do it! (Unless it’s Finn. Everyone hates Finn.)


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